But New York pizza was never about Italian pizza – it was its own gloriously cheesy thing. Moreover, these pies are closer in spirit to the Italian ideal. Don't get me wrong: They turn out great pies - crispy, charcoal-y and topped with quality ingredients (say, artisan sausage). But now the slice is competing with the gourmet pie, as in the brick-oven places that have popped up all around New York (and the rest of the country, for that matter). The end result? Mediocrity has become the new normal in New York pizza.ģ) The gourmet-ization of pizza: When I was growing up in the city during the '70s and '80s, slice pizza was pretty much the only game in town – and that made it a competitive terrain unto itself. So, the dollar-slice joint leads to – you guessed it – more dollar-slice joints (or worse yet, mid-priced parlors rebranding themselves as dollar-slice ones and tweaking the product as a result). It's not just that the dollar slice is so blah, it's that it makes the $3 slice seem like a stretch (even if the $3 slice is probably three times better). My experience is that these slices are rushed out after just a few minutes, so the pizza is almost laughably fold-able - like eating a sauce-covered dishrag.Ģ) The proliferation of those buck-a-slice places (part 2): I'm hardly the first to note this, but it still bears repeating: When you lower the price of a popular commodity, you lower the bar overall. For that matter, "pizza cracker" implies that the pizza is given enough time in the oven to get a decent crust.
And an under-seasoned cracker, too: You rarely get that hint of Italian spices or full-flavored cheeses (like Romano) that give a pie that top note of character.
HUMBLE PIE PEORIA CRACKER
But everything is spread so thin – the crust itself and then what goes on it - that the result is more a pizza cracker than a true pizza. My beef with such slices is not that any one individual component is so bad – I've seen the bags of real flour that go into the dough. The sheer economics of buck-a-slice parlors is such that they can't turn out great pies it's pizza in a fast-food vein.
But with dollar pizza, there's also little flavor. Sometimes, all you want in a slice is the "idea" of a pizza, as in a little sauce, a little cheese and a little bread. 1) The proliferation of those buck-a-slice places (part 1): Look, I'm no pizza snob.